A tear within a father’s
eye,
A mother’s aching
heart,
Can only tell the agony
How hard it is to part.

Could anything be more plaintive than that, without
requiring further concessions of grammar? Could
anything be likely to do more toward reconciling deceased
to circumstances, and making him willing to go?
Perhaps not. The power of song can hardly be
estimated. There is an element about some poetry
which is able to make even physical suffering and
death cheerful things to contemplate and consummations
to be desired. This element is present in the
mortuary poetry of Philadelphia degree of development.

The custom I have been treating of is one that should
be adopted in all the cities of the land.

It is said that once a man of small consequence died,
and the Rev. T. K. Beecher was asked to preach the
funeral sermon —­a man who abhors the lauding
of people, either dead or alive, except in dignified
and simple language, and then only for merits which
they actually possessed or possess, not merits which
they merely ought to have possessed. The friends
of the deceased got up a stately funeral. They
must have had misgivings that the corpse might not
be praised strongly enough, for they prepared some
manuscript headings and notes in which nothing was
left unsaid on that subject that a fervid imagination
and an unabridged dictionary could compile, and these
they handed to the minister as he entered the pulpit.
They were merely intended as suggestions, and so
the friends were filled with consternation when the
minister stood in the pulpit and proceeded to read
off the curious odds and ends in ghastly detail and
in a loud voice! And their consternation solidified
to petrification when he paused at the end, contemplated
the multitude reflectively, and then said, impressively:

“The man would be a fool who tried to add anything
to that. Let us pray!”

And with the same strict adhesion to truth it can
be said that the man would be a fool who tried to
add anything to the following transcendent obituary
poem. There is something so innocent, so guileless,
so complacent, so unearthly serene and self-satisfied
about this peerless “hog-wash,” that the
man must be made of stone who can read it without
a dulcet ecstasy creeping along his backbone and quivering
in his marrow. There is no need to say that this
poem is genuine and in earnest, for its proofs are
written all over its face. An ingenious scribbler